Its also inefficient; in a September 2022 survey, Gartner found that just 3% of companies would actually fire employees who refused to show up after a mandate went out, and fewer than a third would dispatch HR to talk to non-compliers. 

Just to add insult to injury: Moving to full-time, in-person work from a fully remote or hybrid plan is just as likely to make an employee quit as a 2% to 3% pay cut would, finds a new Federal Reserve report, The Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2022, released this week. It draws from The Feds Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED), conducted in October 2022. 

Mandates invariably result in losing top talent

Nicholas Bloom, economics professor at Stanford and co-founder of WFH Research, told Fortune last year that any kind of compulsory office return is doomed to result in losing skilled workers. (The workers clearly already know this; as of January 2023, remote-friendly jobs on LinkedIn receive as much as 50% of all applications, despite the fact that they represent only about 15% of listings.)

Women, people with disabilities, and people of color all have a preference for remote work, Bloom said. Companies that forge ahead despite those wishes will face issues of diversity if they continue on this; thats just another cost I dont think theyre aware of.

Say a worker only comes in two days a week instead of the required three, Bloom proposed. If HR discovers this and tells the workers manager, Where does the manager go from there? he asks. They can either ignore it, which would make it clear to employees that the rule has no teeth, or they can penalize people and say, I know you perform well and hit your targets, but your attendance isnt good, so were slashing your pay. Both are bad options. Either way you execute, I dont see how its a good policy.

Why remote wins

The Fed found what a lot of research has found over the past couple years: People who work from home at least a few days a week greatly value the arrangement. Workers have said it makes them more productive, provides them with a better work-life balance, and eliminates that pesky commute, freeing up time to check off day-to-day tasks like laundry and grocery shopping or even working more. It also might help their bank accounts.

Many Americans have been watching their household budgets closely with the down economy and inflation, George Anders, LinkedIns senior editor at large, told Fortune in February. Working remotely is often a money saver because it reduces commuting costs to zero, while also making lunch, coffee, et cetera, much more affordable.

Just one day in the office sets a hybrid worker back approximately $51, according to research from Owl Labs, a video-conferencing devices company. That number comes from the cost of meals and transport, neither of which workplaces typically cover. The smaller day-to-day costs of in-person worka coffee here, a new pair of sensible office shoes therecomes to $863 per month, nearly double the cost of working from home. 

Employers considering a return-to-office mandate should probably consider providing a stipend, free lunch, or pre-tax commuter benefits to help offset the costs, Frank Weishaupt, Owl Labs CEO, told Fortune.

Where the office edges out an advantage

Yet, working from home isnt exactly free either. Lack of face time often leads to proximity bias, wherein in-person workers make better connections and ultimately earn promotions at a faster clip than their remote counterparts. Things can also add up pretty quickly on the financial front, like energy coststhose who use heating oil and propane paid $302 a month to heat their homes last year, according to data bill pay service Doxo provided to Fortune. At least in the office, the A/C bill doesnt show up in your mailbox. Plus, youre unlikely to be on the hook for computer equipment, coffee, or printer paper. 

But then theres the matter of time. 

A needless commute could also be seen as a matter of disrespect for workers time and energy. People spentI just calculated this morning$16,000 a year to commute, on average, Koen Blanquart, leadership expert and author of flexible-work book The Suitcase Office, said in February. 

Its not as though commuting is anyones first choice for how to spend their time. Nearly all (84%) respondents to a FlexJobs survey said the top benefit of working remotely was eliminating the commute, which costs an annual average of $8,466. Just to add insult to injury, the Census Bureau found that the average American workers commute has jumped 10% in duration since 2006, and doubled over the same period for those taking public transport.

But even in-office perks like free lunch or commuter benefits dont address the problem of inflation, which, for most workers the Fed surveyed, has created a fairly grim situation. 

As a result, its no surprise that most adults are taking a closer look at their habits, and looking for areas to curb their spending. And, perhaps to bosses chagrin, going into the office could be first on the chopping block.

As decentralized finance publication The Defiant reports, a platform called Radiant Capital has been dangling the promise of 60% yieldsa return more than 12 times higher than even the best traditional savings accountsusing automated looping. Other protocols, including Metronome, are also offering a way to automate the risky trading strategy.

Bloomberg recently dubbed looping crypto sorcery, but what exactly is it?

The basics

In traditional banks, customers safeguard their cash and earn interest on their savings. To make a profit, banks lend out some customer deposits to borrowers, who in turn pay a higher interest rate. Banks make money from the spread, or difference between the rate they pay customers to safeguard their money and the rate they are paid by borrowers.

Among DeFi lending protocols, the same logic appliesbut with a caveat. Many protocols issue their own tokens and hand them out to depositors as an incentive to use the platform. These tokens are worth something and because of that, you get into this weird situation where the lending APR actually exceeds the borrower APR, Sunny Aggarwal, a cofounder of Osmosis Labs, which supports the eponymous DeFi exchange, told Fortune.

This presents an opportunity. A crypto investor can, for example, deposit $100 worth of Bitcoin as collateral in a lending protocol. The bank pays her 8% interest on her deposit along with 2% in its own token, resulting in a composite rate of 10%, greater than the banks borrowing rate. The investor then borrows $80 of Bitcoin, deposits it again, borrows a little bit less, deposits that, and so on. Eventually, an investor has ballooned the Bitcoin shes put into the protocol and is earning 60% or more in interest on the original amount.

There are analogues to, say, the housing market, says Mark Lurie, CEO of Shipyard, which develops specialized decentralized exchanges for the crypto market. A real estate investor can buy a property, rent it, and then take out a loan against the house to buy another property. Then, the investor rents it out, takes out another loan, and loops the investment yet again.

The higher you do that, a little change in the housing market can cause it to unravel, Lurie told Fortune.

The risks

Like real estate investors buying up properties and renting them out through loans, looping puts traders on a balance beam, says Lurie.

The delicate equilibrium may suddenly be upset if, for example, a protocol changes its lending and borrowing rates or decides to stop issuing its own native tokens to lenders. The more people who do this and pile into a trade, the more efficient the lending market becomes, and so the arbitrage goes away, Lurie told Fortune.

There are also platform risks, says Ahmed Ismail, CEO and founder of FLUIDai, which plans to use machine learning to aggregate prices for cryptocurrencies across different exchanges. Hacks of DeFi protocols are still common, and sometimes hundreds of millions can be lost. You borrow, you lend, you borrow, you lend, he told Fortune. You multiply the risk.

Moreover, some looping techniques rely not on the interest differential provided by a DeFi protocol but interest from yield-bearing tokens, which provide holders yield in addition to the changing price of the asset itself. 

One of the most common examples is stETH, which represents how much Ether someone has effectively staked, or put into escrow to help the Ethereum blockchain run. Similar to the earlier scenario where protocols hand out native tokens to incentivize people to deposit, traders can deposit stETH in a lending protocol and earn interest on their collateral as well as the interest the token naturally provides. This combined rate exceeds the cost of borrowing, which presents another opportunity to loop.

However, similar to the variability in interest rates on lending protocols, the yield from stETH can change, and the higher a tower an investor builds, the more easily it can crumble when stETHs interest rate moves just slightly. This is more risky than the other one, Aggarwal of Osmosis told Fortune, in reference to looping with stETH as opposed to looping with, say, Bitcoin on a protocol where the rate to lend is higher than the rate to borrow.

Automated looping

Looping as a crypto trading strategy has existed for some time, at least since DeFi lending protocols first emerged and enticed users by issuing native tokens. Its popularity waxes and wanes according to the state of the larger crypto market, says Lurie of Shipyard. In bull markets, this happens a lot, he told Fortune.

Now, as the technology powering DeFi has become more sophisticated and transaction fees have decreased due to the rise of so-called layer-2s, some developers are making the trading strategy more efficient, says Jordan Kruger, cofounder of Bloq, a DeFi company. It becomes really difficult to do this repetitive looping manually, she told Fortune.

This is why Metronome, a DeFi protocol that Bloq developed, lets traders automate what yield-bearing tokens they decide to loop. And because traders dont have to manually monitor changing interest rates, Kruger says, some of the risk disappears. Radiant Capital, the protocol advertised in The Defiants newsletter, also offers automated looping.

That being said, the more an investor loops, the more risk they take on. But for those exploring the Wild West of crypto, risk comes with the territory.

People in crypto love taking on extra risk for extra reward, Josh Fraser, cofounder of Origin Protocol, told Fortune.

But the practice is outdated and riddled with bias. 

Research consistently shows that in the few seconds it takes for a hiring manager to scan a CV they have already judged the candidate based on irrelevant (to the role) information like their name (with non-white sounding names at a disadvantage) and home address. 

Meanwhile, those with employment gaps or looking to make a side-step into a new industry are all too often overlooked.

Khyati Sundaram, the CEO of Applied, knows the feeling all too well. 

She founded the recruitment platform that reduces bias with techniques such as anonymizing résumés after her own CV was rejected over 100 times.

It was just exhausting, she tells Fortune. 

Sundaram started her career in banking for the likes of JPMorgan and launched her first failed tech venture Fosho in 2013, before rejoining the job market where recruiters werent a fan of her squiggly career. 

They said I couldnt get a banking job despite having done it for six years (but not for the last four years) because I was doing a startup job which according to them was basically a sabbatical, she says.

With millions of jobs set to be displaced by artificial intelligence, its a conundrum Sundaram predicts many candidates will find themselves inand one that employers could easily counterbalance by scrapping CV requirements altogether.

In a society which is going to look so different with A.I., we really need to rethink what skills look like, she says. Sundaram insists that experience will no longer be a relevant parameter to recruiters because certain jobs might not even exist.

If that personwhose job has been lost to A.I.sends their CV out in 20 years time, should we just bin it because they dont have the experience for this new job? Or should we try to understand what other skills this person brings? she adds.

How skills-based hiring works

Research shows that skills-based hiring is on the rise, with a 63% year-on-year growth, but the worlds largest book publisher, Penguin Random House, was way ahead of the curve.

As of 2021, the publishing house employed over 10,000 people across 20 countriesand anyone hired in the last six years has been asked to complete an anonymized skills-based test through Applied, instead of the conventional CV and cover letter requirements. 

An example of a skills-based test question is something like: Its 5 p.m. on a Friday and you have these five tasks to do but you can only do three, which would you work on?

Thats a situational judgment test, which allows us to infer the thinking process and the behaviors of the person, Sundaram says. That particular question is testing for prioritization and communication.

The answers are then anonymized, randomized and rated by a panel of hiring managers to prevent any bias. 

By testing candidates on how theyd handle the actual day-to-day responsibilities of a role, employers are more likely to hire the best person for the job instead of being drawn by big names and snazzy titles.

As Sundaram points out, just because someone has listed on their CV that theyve worked with the SEO team at somewhere alluring like Google, it doesnt actually mean they know the ins and outs of search engine optimization to the extent thats required for a role. 

We are trying to make sure the test or the question is as relevant to the job as possible and thats the reason that candidates love it too, Sundaram says. They see that it is really relevant to the role as opposed to writing and sending out the same cover letter, but having to spend 20 minutes tweaking it for every employer.

It takes candidates longer, yet increases engagement

Even Sundaram admits that shed intuitively assume that taking multiple skills-based tests would feel like more of a nuisance for candidates than simply blasting their CV at hundreds of roles. But the data shows otherwise, she says.

Applied has worked with over 700,000 applications and over half a million candidates, who Sundaram says have rated their satisfaction with the platform a solid nine out of 10.

Every candidate who applies through us absolutely comes back and says, I loved it because I was allowed to showcase myselfit was not just a piece of paper that I sent in a black hole and never heard back, she adds. 

Plus, for candidates who are often overlooked, skills-based testing finally offers them a fair shot at bagging their dream job.

For example, Applied data reveals that the number of women hired into senior roles increases by almost 70% when candidates were asked role-specific questions.

Of the 2,260 candidates they hired into senior roles following a skills-based interview, 52% were women. This is a 68% increase on the global average, where women account for just 31% of senior positions.

So it is about equalizing the playing field making sure people have access to the workforce that would otherwise not be possible, Sundaram insists. 

Plus, the data was equally as advantageous for businesses bottom line. 

Sundaram says that Applied closely monitors not only if the right person was matched for the role through retention rates, but also whether they are thriving in the job through promotion rates. 

The churn rate for candidates who have been hired by Applied is 7%, compared to the U.K. average of 17%. Meanwhile, it usually takes a candidate around three years into a new job to be promoted, versus one year for Applied candidates. 

According to Sundaram: The proof is in the pudding.

Shark Tank star Barbara Corcoran disagreesshe spends it all.

The real estate mogul says shes never saved a penny in her lifea philosophy installed in her by her motherand that by investing it in business or other people the returns have kept coming back.

Corcoran, who earned her millionaire title courtesy of her New York Real Estate business The Corcoran Group, told CNBC her best advice for making money is to spend it in the first place.

Im just not a believer in saving money. Ive never saved a dime my whole life, she said.

 I had a mom who raised 10 kids on a shoestring budget, and she always said money is meant to be spent. And she didnt have much to spend.

The lesson stuck with the property mogul, who having sold her business for $66 million in 2001, immediately began plotting how she could spend it.

And thats fine, she believes, as long as youre spending your money on the right things.

The 74-year-old said she gave half the sale proceeds to family, friends, education funds, charities, because I really believe if you spend, money comes back to you.

I think the carefree attitude of believing that money makes money, if youre willing to share it and spend it, really works, or at least it has certainly worked for me, she continued. And I dont believe in hoarding money, saving money, everything like that. Because for meit would take my spirit away.

Investing is certainly a key component of her role on Shark Tank, with Corcoran having offered up an estimated $16 million according yo Humblerisea website dedicated to the show.

Even then, Corcoran has previously been open about the fact that not many of her businesses have provided huge returnsshes simply in it to support passionate people.

Ive invested in 150 businesses, and Ive made money on about 10%, she revealed earlier this year. Im looking for ambition. Someone who envisions where theyre going, and I fall for it when they tell me theyre going there.

The TV mogulwho nearly lost her spot on the panel before an episode even airedadded shes nearly gone bankrupt five times and always managed to bounce back.

The last timeduring the 1990-1991 recessionCorcorans mother told her: Dont worry about the money. Its a waste of time. I thought of an idea that made me a million dollars the next week.

What do the other sharks say?

The other sharks on Shark Tank have other ideas.

Mark Cuban, for one, has the opposite mentality to his panel peer.

In 2015, Cuban shared his tips on how to get rich, and his advice was pretty simple: Save your money. Save as much money as you possibly can. Every penny you can. Instead of coffee, drink water. Instead of going to McDonalds, eat mac and cheese.

Cut up your credit cards. If you use a credit card, you dont want to be rich. The first step to getting rich requires discipline. If you really want to be rich, you need to find the discipline.

Fellow panelist Daymond John is also a fan of saving, encouraging members of the public to think before [they] spend.

3/Think before you spend. Ask yourself if you really need something before you buy it. If its not a necessity, consider saving your money instead.

Daymond John (@TheSharkDaymond) March 11, 2023

Speaking on Youtube John explained: Every time you get a dollar or a pay chequethere are three ways to spend that money and people always use them backwards.

Number one: you pay for what you absolutely need. Number two [is] really critical: invest. Number three treat yourselves to the things you dont need but you would like to have.

People usually do number three as number one they never do number two and number one is number three.

And Canadian businessman Kevin OLeary is also a fan of savingthough not to the same extent of other professional finance experts.

OLeary suggests individuals should have three months of salary on hand in case of emergency but not the six or even 12-months worth personal finance expert Suze Orman suggests.

Speaking to CNBC, OLeary explained this is because of high inflation rates relative to interest, meaning money left in the bank isnt getting the gains it traditionally should.

Instead he suggests investing: Savings in cash in a bank account make basically no interest, certainly after inflation. Investing is keeping pace with the equity and stock markets. And I think youve really got to understand the difference between the two.